How to Find Untapped Keyword Ideas? Fast and Easy

Keywords are one of those website optimization elements that seem to be the most important for every website owner, blogger, e-commerce store runner and freelance writer. Search engine crawlers still perceive the text better than any other forms of content. So keywords stay those major instruments of optimization and promotion of a website.

For years bloggers and SEOs addressed to Google Keyword Planner during they research for keywords. It was free and provided a sufficient data about the search volume and competitiveness for keywords users typed into the Google search field over years. But recent changes in its functionality (grouping keyword volumes mainly) make this tool not as helpful as it was before and push users to search for alternative ways of keyword research.

Google Keyword Planner Pitfalls

One of the researches on Moz revealed that those average search volumes SEOs are used to count on are in fact too average. If we check out two keywords with the same “average volumes” in some of the advanced keyword tools, we may be surprised how they volumes differ. E.g. if we search for “web design” in GKP, we get the keyword ideas like ‘web agency’ and ‘web design company’ that have the same 10K – 100K average monthly searches.

If we check out those keywords in other keyword tools, they usually show us more exact numbers for search volume that may differ significantly. Thus, we can see that ‘web agency’ has 9K global search volume:

While ‘web design company’ shows whooping 23K of global searches that is 14K more than ‘web agency’:

Taking into account that click rate for the ‘web design company’ is higher and the difficulty is lower, it’s a good point to consider the latter as a good keyword for your project or blog post.

Essential Keyword Metrics to Consider

When you’re searching for the keyword ideas, you shouldn’t just grab a bunch of random phrases you like and optimize your content. This tactic leads to nothing and definitely won’t bring you the desired results – getting into the Google’s Top10. Thus you should take a closer look at your keywords and check out the following characteristics:

Search volume. It displays the number of searches users perform for a given keyword. As I mentioned above, Keyword Planner shows average numbers that are way too rough. So it’s better to check out the search volume at other resources.

Keyword difficulty. This metric will show you how hard it will be to trudge your way to the top for a given keyword. It is measured by a number of backlinks you should get to the page to get it ranked in the Top10.

Estimated traffic. It’s all simple here: the higher this metric is – the more traffic you may get to your page for a given keyword.

Number of clicks. Some keywords may have a decent search volume but a low number of clicks. Google treats some search queries as ‘questions’ and shows the answer to them right on the search results page, e.g. ‘new york weather forecast’. Since users get the answer at once, the results for those queries usually get a low number of clicks. So you should consider the so-called ‘topical’ keywords with a decent number of clicks.

Finding Keywords without Keyword Planner

It doesn’t mean that Google Keyword Planner is completely useless and you totally forget it. It can suggest you keywords for your existing landing page or bring you a ton of ideas for your product pages from its entire database of keywords for various industries.

And, of course, GKP is still the best tool for search engine marketing research and PPC campaigns. It is the primary function of Google Keyword Planner. When you search for keywords for your own website or blog, it’s better to use some alternatives. Let’s check out the best and sometimes not so obvious ways of finding untapped keyword ideas.

Get into Your Users’ Shoes

Most of the website owners make the same mistake when they start researching keywords: they just aim at the keywords with the highest search volume and the greatest traffic potential. And end up targeting keywords all other including their competitors are into. Nevertheless, the statistics from Google claims that up to 20% of searches have never been performed before. It’s a great number actually. And you can definitely bite off a piece of that juicy pie.

There are a few ways you can do it:

Do some guesswork and try to figure out what keyword phrases users can type into the search field. Pretend that you know nothing about your product’s features and peculiarities: how would you search for it?

Ask your users and potential clients directly: they can leave feature requests in support chats or on social media, drop you some ideas for your product improvement or a new product line etc.

Guessing the Keywords

In the first case, you just have to try out searching Google using descriptive phrases that can help you understand the so-called “user’s search intent”. Thus, you can try to imagine what would users who don’t know the ‘coffee brewer’ title type into Google. Variants like ‘device for making coffee’ would be a good suggestion.

Then take a look at the ‘Related searches’ area below the SERP. I bet you can find a bunch of amazing ideas among those suggestions. And they will be much better than those you can get in Google Keyword Planner.

Another good idea is using Google Trends to check out seasonal keywords or keywords that show a good search volume through the years.

Asking for Users’ Help

There are many ways of getting the feedback from users: onboarding forms, questionnaires and simple requests for feedback in emails, on-site forms, autoresponders, posts in social media etc. Of course, you will not ask them to drop you a few keyword ideas. Just ask the questions they may be interested in.

People love sharing their experience, both good and bad. Ask them about their goals or cases when your product helped them to achieve success. Or the issues they solved with your help. Don’t be afraid of getting complaints about the product or service – use them to improve. By the way, you can also ask people what product or service they would like to get from you.

The feedback from your users will not only provide you with a fresh portion of information. You will also get:

Ideas for new features or product line that your competitors might not offer yet;

Blog topics ideas and the keywords you may use for your website optimization;

The best thing is that you will get the idea of what words and phrases your customers use when they search or describe your product and thus you can optimize your website product pages or blog posts to target your audience exclusively.

Check Out Your Competitors

As famous saying states “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” Of course, your competitors are not your enemies. But to succeed you still need to know as much as you can about them. Finding out your competitors’ keyword and piggybacking them is a great tactic to get higher in SERPs.

Almost all advanced SEO tools like Moz, Ahrefs, etc give you an opportunity to learn what keywords your competitors are targeting. Just drop their URL into the tool and you’ll get a list of keywords you may use for creating your content and optimizing your pages for. Choose those ones that But don’t just try to mimic their content for those keywords. You should go farther than your competitors and create content 10x better than theirs to get to the Top10.

Here is a quick video which explains how one can rank their content in Top10 by WhiteBoard Friday Moz:

Improve the Keywords You Already Rank for

If you already run a website for some time, you already have pages and old blog posts you rank for in Google. All you have to do is check out your Google Search Console for the keywords and choose ones that already perform well in searches.

The only drawback of this method is that search console shows you only the first 1,000 keywords and doesn’t provide you with keyword search volumes.So you will need to check those you like in your favorite keyword tool to get more data about them.

What’s Next?

After you gathered a good bunch of keywords you need to sort them out, choose the best ones and start optimizing your content. You may sort them by:

‘parent’ topic. It’s the main topic of your website or blog. Or it can be your business niche. This group usually includes the most ‘general’ keywords of all.

user intent. This group will include more specific, long-tail keywords that your potential customers may type into the search field while looking for a product or service.

Choose the keywords that have a decent search volume along with good traffic flow numbers and lower difficulty. Thus you will have better chances to outrank your competitors.

Just remember: you don’t need a lot of keywords, you need only good and valuable keywords. Write them naturally into your content and Google will rank it for more semantically-close keywords in addition.

2 comments to “How to Find Untapped Keyword Ideas? Fast and Easy”

Great guide and Keyword Planner is the best free tool for keyword research, but it can be very time-consuming to find profitable keywords with low competition that you KNOW you can rank for without investing a lot of time in SEO also. I personally had a lot of success using http://longtailpro.com to find really good keywords in any niche in just a few minutes. What do you think about it, have you tried it?

I believe the keyword research is not the only and the main part that will help you to rank. But it’s a huge and very important part. Longtail keywords are perfect since they are easier to rank for, and they help you to rank for even more other keywords.

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